Recovery of hydrocarbons from fossil fuels and polymeric materials via the liquefaction, solubilization, dissolution, and/or extraction is highly convoluted. This can be attributed to the fact that fossil fuels and polymeric materials, e.g., such as oil shale, coal, oil (tar) sands, heavy crude oil, crude oil, natural gas, oil sludge, organic garbage, rubber and plastics containing organic matter, e.g., as bitumen, kerogen, natural asphalt, asphaltene and/or polymers, comprise organic polymers of extremely complex structures. A need exists to produce additional liquid feed stock for the manufacture of liquid fuels, gaseous fuels, as well as for the recovery of discarded polymeric materials such as tires and plastics to minimize the consumption of material resources and energy required for processing such material resources.
Processes for the devulcanization of rubber, as well as the liquefaction, solubilization and/or extraction of hydrocarbon-containing organic matter from hydrocarbon-containing materials, using turpentine liquids have been developed as described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,767,722 and U.S. Pat. No. 8,101,812, which are incorporated by reference herein in their entirety.
It is, however, highly desirable that additional such technologies be developed, which deploy different sustainable, environmentally-friendly, i.e., “green,” solvents to further enhance the efficacy and/or lower the costs of the technologies or processes for the recovery of hydrocarbons from hydrocarbon-containing materials. A technical article by Roy et al. (Indian Journal of Technology, vol. 14, pp. 298-300, 1976) reported that Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) has an extraction capacity of 23%. However, the coal was contacted with a very high ratio of DMSO to coal (30:1) for 7-16 hours. When micron-sized (325 mesh) coal was used, a higher yield of 45% was obtained. Nevertheless, the extraction yield was not directly measured from the reduction in the weight of coal but indirectly estimated from the increase in the sulfur content of coal because the DMSO containing sulfur was adsorbed by the coal sample and could not be separated by washing. Importantly, such fine particles used in Roy et al. cannot be used in industrial hydrocarbon extraction processes because of not only the impracticality and costs of grinding coal to such a small size, but also the concomitant danger of explosion.